


tether

by ahala



Category: Julius Caesar - Shakespeare, Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Mountaineering, travel fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27650183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahala/pseuds/ahala
Summary: The escapades of two alpinists summiting a mountain.
Relationships: Mark Antony/Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. Camp 1

The snow is growing deeper. It’s prickly and yielding under his microspikes, and despite his three layers of socks, Brutus’s feet refuse to get warm. His balance shifts, adjusting to the gait of the person in front of him leaving the prints in the snow as he works to step in those same prints. Brutus looks ahead as he marches along, and his squinting gaze falls on the figure in front of him. That pink harness about his waist stands out from the white landscape and the black blemishes of the mountains, as does the large coil of multicolored rope hanging off of his pack. _Their_ rope. Using it with any other climber would be like adultery, a betrayal of the highest order. 

* * *

It is five o’clock in the evening. The sun is bright. Antony pants, squinting through his round sunglasses as he digs the shovel into the thick drifts of snow and tosses it aside onto a larger pile. He sticks his shovel into the snow and begins to form a thick wall out of the pile. Then, he starts to dig again. His shoulders are aching, his foot bones grinding, the soreness in his muscles and the pangs in his belly singing in harmony. Still, the repeated movement generates some warmth, and eventually, he feels sweat running from his armpits, down his sides. 

He straightens and looks around. They are above the treeline, standing on a lip of the massive shoulder of the mountain. _Maybe I should’ve picked up some sticks as we went along_. A stinging gust of wind flays the skin from his cheeks and scatters any thoughts of a fire from his mind. “How’s the tent coming along?” He calls, trudging over to the sleds. “And have you found the stove yet?”

* * *

An airplane buzzes overhead. The light filtering through the tent is a vibrant orange. It gives the illusion that it might be warm. It is, a bit. Steam rises from plastic packages filled with bastardised, reanimated food. Heavy jackets and insulated suits lay abandoned in big piles of fabric. Water bubbles in preparation for tea. 

“You brought Fritos?” He’s jealous this time, not reprimanding. 

He speaks with his mouth full. “For the chili mac.”

“Damn.”

“Want some?” A pause. “Have some.” 

* * *

The wind is back, magicking powder into the tent from somewhere. Brutus can’t figure it out. He tosses and his cheek manages to brush the outside of his sleeping bag. He retreats within like a turtle. He wonders how long he’s been staring into the dark, wondering if his feet are getting warmer or if they are losing feeling, how many more hours until it’s time to get up, how much longer the wind will continue. He turns onto his side and his diaphragm struggles against the awkward position and the unforgiving atmosphere that seems to steal oxygen right out of his body.

The wind taunts. _Air rushing at eighty kilometres, and none of it is for you_.

He coughs. Wheezes. 

The oversized caterpillar beside him stirs, yawns. “You okay?”

“The altitude.”

The pile of fabric shushes and shifts, and then a water bottle hits his abdomen. Brutus gropes around for the bottle and drinks. The water is warm. 

“You want my jacket?”

He grunts a negative, chewing the plastic opening of the bottle as he lets the water slowly trickle into his mouth. 

“Here,” Antony says. “I’m too hot anyway.” He sits up and struggles out of his thick sherpa jacket. It lands on Brutus’s face. Antony flops back down, burrowing into his sleeping bag, and is silent once more.

Brutus sets the bottle aside and tries to slip the jacket on over his head without leaving his sarcophagus of a sleeping bag. He shimmies, tugging the fabric down, trying his best not to let any of the heat escape. He pulls the hood up and sighs. The warmth trickles down his body, filling up the insulated bag. It’s a baptism of body heat.

He breathes deep. It doesn’t do much. He does notice, however, the smell of cheap Irish Spring deodorant and minty menthol creams, distant fabric softener, tobacco. Those smells are comforting ones, he tells himself. Stop thinking about it, he tells himself.

He’s thankful when his blush flames onto his cheeks; that warms him up, too. 


	2. Camp 2

The fact that he can’t feel the bite of his snow-chair is either a testament to the workmanship of his pants, or his rear has gone numb. He sucks slowly on a plastic pouch filled with overly-sweet gel, his elbows resting on his knees, steadying the cold binoculars he holds to his eyes.

It’s been two hours since they stopped. Brutus’s cough had returned, Antony was ogling a pure white face of a little ridge to their east. A little speck is heading up the crest of the ridge on the east side, keeping the snow on the west face pristine.  _ I should have gone with him _ , he thinks to himself again. Still, no sense in going up if it was going to take him twenty times longer to get down. An avalanche beacon rests in his lap beneath the crumpled bag of chips he had fished out of Antony’s food cache.

The speck pauses, dips low, sitting down. When it rises to move again, it’s movements are stilted and awkward, and then it jumps.

Big curving arcs are cut into the mountainside, some swept over by the little avalanches triggered by the disturbance of the waxed board gliding over the midday powder. He can’t help but feel a little nervous when he cuts away from a cluster of exposed rock inches before colliding with it. The speck, growing larger and larger, whoops as he rushes down the straightaway, beating his chest. Brutus’s cracked lips grow into a smile.

* * *

  
  


Packaged rice for lunch. It’s supposed to taste like chicken, but it tastes like sodium and warmth, lighting him up all the way down to his belly. Brutus will take it. 

“You ate my chips!”

* * *

  
  


The tent is empty when the alarm on his watch loudly beeps at him to wake up. It’s rare for his alarm to need to serve its function. Brutus wants to linger just a few moments more, appreciate the warmth between his toes and the dampness under his armpits. Antony’s sweater is pulled up to his chin. Over the last few days, it has made its way into Brutus’s things. 

It’s not very cold out, comparatively. Antony sits on an overturned sled outside, his gloveless hands tenderly holding onto a mug of hot tea. He leans over and scoops up a few handfuls of snow, tossing it into the little metal pot on the stove. Brutus watches him, and then leans back, letting his back pop and his stomach stretch. “I see  _ you _ slept well,” says Antony, pointedly. The loud reds and oranges and greens of the fleece stand out strong against the snow and the blinding blue sky.

“For once, yeah, it was—”

He’s grinning. 

“Piss off.” Brutus wrenches out of Antony’s sherpa and throws it over him. It knocks over the pot of water, and the snow hisses, retreating into water.

“Oh—hey! Now look what you’ve done!” He’s laughing. “You know, Brutus, no one’s out here. There's no need for violence. You can drop the act and just admit that you love me.”

Brutus blenches. Antony stammers. 

They pack up their camp in a terse silence. Both are thankful for the wailing winds that set in as the day progresses.

The strange hours that pass in the freezing wilderness do a poor job of mending such blisters. 


	3. Camp 3

The peony dawn peers around a tower of rock and snow to see two men deep in a notch, ice axes glinting in the new light, standing before a minor icefall. Crevasses were few and far between. The glacier yawns into the wind. It stretches big, and its joints pop and rumble from deep beneath their feet. Brutus shifts anxiously from one foot to another, looking up at Antony, who hacks away at the ice. Ten more feet, he thinks, and he’ll start after him. 

Antony’s foothold crumbles away, shale-like pieces of ice crumbling from the face and falling to the ground. Brutus watches. His other footfall breaks as well, and before he can refasten his axes, he’s falling a few metres to the last ice screw he put in the wall. The rope tugs him to a halt at the screw, which somehow falls apart. Brutus cannot tell how it happens, even as it occurs right before his eyes. All he can make out is disaster, and all he can do is watch. Nothing more.

Antony falls in slow motion. He course corrects by the millisecond, attempting to save himself with a lucky strike of his ice axe or his crampons. Instinctively, Brutus holds fast to the rope, but it matters not; it’s all falling apart, and there isn’t enough slack to save Antony from the ground.

He falls hard, his mouth immediately working like a fish out of water, gasping for air that was smashed from his lungs.

“Stop!” Brutus yells at him, rushing to his side. “ _ Don’t move _ .” He kneels behind Antony’s head, stilling him. Cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral. His mind races. Can you feel this? Can you feel that? What hurts? What’s broken? What am I going to do now?

Antony is patient enough; the fall scared him. Antony experiencing any sort of fear is cause enough for Brutus to be petrified. People who just traipse into the death zone with no supplemental oxygen, people who find themselves on Koshtan-Tau in a matter of hours don’t experience fear the same way anyone else does.

The vertebrae seem to be intact. He’s not out of the woods yet, Brutus knows, but he calms himself enough to the point where he can get angry.

“What the hell is this?” Brutus demands, holding up the shoddily tied knot, a mess of carabiners and a Grivel ice screw. 

“Look, I just made a mistake…”

“The fuck you did. Elite high-altitude mountaineer, and here you are, tying knots about as well as a five year old who can’t even tie his fucking shoes.” He throws down the rope, kicks it with his crampon’d foot. “We can’t be doing shit like that up here,  _ gods _ . You could've actually died by this, do you know that?” He huffs a breath, gives an ugly grin of disbelief and panic. “What the hell am I supposed to  _ do _ without you?”

Antony looks up at him, cow-eyed.

* * *

The ranger signs off of the radio after walking Brutus through a more in-depth analysis of Antony’s spine.  _ Pain killers, ice, rest, and attentiveness _ . It seems like so little in the scope of the potential danger. He’s seen people die from much less. His mind drifts to that haunting day in the death zone, turning away from that man, that  _ mentor _ , laying in the snow, having collapsed on himself… He shakes it off. No time to be haunted by hypoxic decisions. Brutus gets up and goes to the first aid kit, pawing through the plastic box until he comes to a layer of plastic bags. They are all filled with different pills, labelled and lovingly laid in a big sedimentary pile. He comes across a bag of oxycontin. That would do the trick. Maybe too much. Brutus considers it and then finds an anti-inflammatory instead. He pours the cocktail of pills in his hands, finds that they’re still trembling. 

“Sit up.” He demands. “Take these.”

Antony groans. He rises to his elbows, tosses the pills back with a long drink of water. 

“Turn over.”

“How many more two word phrases can you think of?” He asks, his voice muffled in the sleeping bag. 

“Shut up.” The bruises seem to have worsened and swelled up, but the cuts have stopped bleeding. Brutus pulls the first aid kid back over and starts to dress the scratches and cuts. If his cold hands bother Antony, he keeps his mouth shut about it. A small pile of bandage wrappers begin to accumulate. 

“Rope’s torn,” mumbles Antony eventually.

“Hmm?”

“The rope’s torn. You ripped it with your crampon.”

“That’s seriously what you’re worried about? We have other rope.” The air is uneasy. 

* * *

Antony feels less guilty about forcing them to take a rest day when the weather is already so bad. He can’t see two metres in front of him. Injured or not, they have no place to go. He tries to read, sitting in their piles of goosefeather down, but the wind is loud, and his thoughts are louder. He reads the same sentence over and over again.  _ And, though there was no actual point to it, they loved each other _ .  _ And, though there was no actual point to it, they loved each other. And, though there was no actual- _

“Hey, I made you some tea.”

* * *

It’s hard to stay angry at someone when your limbs brush every time you turn over in the night, and you watch him smile as he scrolls through his phone, and you see his face grow crestfallen when he realises that you’re finally all out of freeze-dried beef stroganoff. It’s hard to stay angry in a tent. It’s hard to stay angry in the wilderness. The image of the dying man comes to mind, and he wonders if Antony has found a way to still be angry about that. 

He starts to affix a section of shrink tube to the damaged sheath of the multicoloured rope, stray strands of superglue drying on his skin.

* * *

Antony is moving slower than usual. And sure, maybe it’s the absurd depth of the snow, or the weight of the sleds that seem to be growing heavier even though they’re actually growing lighter. But Brutus saw his back that morning, his headlamp illuminating the open cuts and darkening bruises that had yet to even think about scabbing over. Wounds don’t heal this high up. Nothing to do about that except keep pushing towards the next camp. 


	4. Camp 4

Not even the sun, beaming  _ so close _ , can quell the incessant cold. No rock formations or canyon notches can save them from the scathing gusts that flow like a jetstream over the ridge. It’s a simple climb at an almost-steep grade. No ice-climbing today. Brutus is thankful for it. His cough is back.

He takes a step in the deep snow. Stops, pants. Takes another step. Stops, pants, spits. Takes another step. Stops, pants, sits down right in the snowdrift, holds his head in his hands. 

* * *

He might’ve left Brutus behind on accident if he hadn’t made a point to look back once his wet cough had seemingly subsided. Assuming that it had just gone away on its own was wishful thinking. Clumsy hands clad in thick, un-digited mittens, work quickly and deftly, rifling through the gear stashed on the back of his sled. 

Trying not to trip through the snow, he trudges back to Brutus.

“How are you holding up?”

“Catching my breath.” When he speaks, he sounds like he’s in the middle of sprinting.

“Here, put this on.”

He looks up and the movement seems to pain him. “That’s for emergencies,” he says dumbly.

“ _ Yeah _ , I know.” 

Brutus takes the regulator, fitting it over his nose, tightening the straps on the back of his head and neck as Antony attaches the two rubber tubes, fitting the canister on Brutus’s pack and gently untwisting the green valve. They wait a minute more and then push on to Camp 4.

* * *

All that’s left is the shitty food. He can’t bring himself to stomach another packet of chicken and dumplings, so he makes himself some porridge, throwing whatever’s around in to flavour it up some. Brutus, his respirator and oxygen resting where he abandoned his large outer jacket and pants, is rifling through the first-aid box.

“What’re you looking for?”

“Pills.”

Antony takes a contemplative bite of porridge. Brutus might be some level of hypoxic, he thinks. “Why don’t you lay down, and I’ll get them for you.”

He seems relieved, immediately giving up his search and retreating back to the pile of mats and sleeping bags. Antony sets his food aside and kneels at the box. Acetazolamide and dexamethasone are on the menu, as is a cough suppressant and a caffeine-laden migraine pill. Brutus takes them with a gulp of Gatorade, and Antony forces him to eat a few bites of now lukewarm porridge. He’s asleep minutes later. It’s after Antony puts the respirator back on him that he remembers why they aren’t climbing partners.

In the next few days, he will have to make a decision whether to go ahead and make a summit push, or turn back to a safer elevation. The dissonance between the love of the summit chase and the love of another person is strong, especially in this world of greys and uneasiness and risks. One of the two will always win out. Antony knows this. 

While Brutus rests, Antony gets the multicoloured rope and touches up the edges of the shrink tape.

* * *

  
  


The elements are relentless, frightening in their ferocity, as if Boreas himself runs his nails down the bright orange synthetic fabric of the tent. Maybe he is cold, too, and wishes to be warm inside. There is no answer from within. A small bulb of hazy yellow light hangs from the arched ceiling, glazing the shiny sleeping bags with its fuzzy glow. The bags have been unzipped and haphazardly re-zipped to one another.

It’s warmer together. It’s a good excuse. They clutch on to one another like penguins huddled on the Antarctic ice. Legs shoved between one another, hands tucked between chests, each exhale warming, each inhale a promise. 

Neither sleeps, but they desperately try. If for no other reason than to temporarily forget about the ghoulish nightmare jutting up from the white sea of snow just a few miles beyond, looming silent and alive in the black night.


	5. Summit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this is so late...finals..  
> at any rate, this whole expedition isn't supposed to take place necessarily in the himalayas, but there is a little part about the everest massif, and this picture is pretty helpful for visualizing what's where: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Nirekha.jpg

Alarm goes off at 3:30 in the morning. They untangle themselves and dress silently. The air is still, and to the east, the sun considers rising. It stirs slightly and the sky morphs into a deep, dark indigo.

They take only what they can carry in their packs and start, leaving the tent and sleds behind, embedded into the snow.

* * *

  
  


The warmth beginning to generate beneath his layers of thick clothing does not come without distrust. Antony punches his legs and arms to test their response.

* * *

Brutus goes first up a matted and gnarled icefall. He swears as he wrenches one of his ice axes out of the wall once he’s dragged himself up onto a reliable ledge. His carabiners and screws jingle about his hips. He tightens the leashes attaching his axes to his wrists. His fingers feel fat and clumsy in their mittens.

The sun is rising now, that odd corona surrounding it like creamy egg white making a halo around that big fat yolk ticking up into the sky, so benign that Brutus could stare upon it with his bare eyes.

At the top of the ice fall, he leans weakly against a rock, holding tight to the belay device, waiting for Antony to appear over the edge. His eyes are blurring dark, fuzzy, and he wonders if his pupils have a corona of their own. 

* * *

Antony hammers an ice anchor down with his axe, kneeling in the snow to clip a carabiner through the top hole of the anchor, and affix a sling to it. He hears Brutus behind him tying the rope onto his harness for their painstakingly slow running-belay. 

The gusts come out of nowhere, rising up from one side of the ridge or other, forcing them to bear down until it subsides. Antony lowers his head, holds tight to the rope. Brutus, the taller of the two, leans on his ice axe and groans. 

A cloud migrates in front of the sun, painting the world with a thick, matte shadow, making the wind just that much more intolerable. Antony, his head down, peers at the east side of the ridge below. 

He makes out a shape hunkered on a ledge. Like a body, its spine is bent, its legs splayed out, that bright, mountainous red unmistakable. Antony’s breath catches. He stares harder. 

The body slumps. Falls over. 

* * *

Five years ago. The eastern face of Lhotse, the vertigo-inducing climb down between the summit and the South Col. A few kilometres away, Mount Everest considered Antony as he fumbled off of the belay, wrestling with his harness. He was moving slow and feeling like death, or maybe just like dying. Climbing the Seven Summits in the span of a month did little to reassure him that he would make it out alive. He was beginning to regret urging his climbing partner to go forth without him, promising him that he would catch up in due time. 

Caesar would know what to do.

The jet stream pushed him back. It felt like he was taking the same step over and over again, never quite moving forward.

He stopped as he came to the beginning of the South Col. His eyes saw three figures. One standing, one kneeling, one slumped in the snow. It took his mind a long time to take in what was going on, and even then, it was difficult to block out the blindingly loud stimuli in order to focus. 

“What happened?” he called. The figure in the snow turned to look back at him. The shift revealed more of the body slumped in the snow, and Antony could make out the dreadfully familiar patchwork on the bicep of the figure’s coat. A collection of silver eagles, each one denoting a mountainous conquest. Worry nudged at Antony’s mind, but he pushed it away as he walked toward the men; Caesar was a capable, seasoned climber.

“High-altitude pulmonary edema,” explained the one kneeling beside Caesar. Antony recognised him as Marcus Brutus. He was little more than an exorbitantly rich weekend-warrior (whose records Antony had just broken), but their paths had crossed more than either man cared to admit. His climbing partner, Gaius Cassius, looked on boredly. “Maybe a heart attack, too. I can’t be sure.” His bare hands were spattered with the same pink froth that dribbled down Caesar’s lips. 

Antony had endured avalanches with more ease than those few words. “We’ll have to be quick then,” he said, bending down to take his climbing partner by the shoulders, preparing to lift him up.

Cassius scoffed, incredulous. He nudged Brutus, who stood up after wiping his hands off in the snow. His shadow blanketed Antony.

“We have to get him down to Base Camp!” Antony implored, helpless and filled with anguish. When neither of the two men moved, he yelled, “He’s going to die if we leave him!”

“And that’s too bad,” said Brutus. There is a hurt in his eyes that Antony cannot parse. Caesar rasped. Maybe he tried to speak. They could all hear the grotesque gurgle in his lungs. “One death is better than four.” The shadow moved and the sun gaped, wondering what Antony would do now. In the distance, avalanche rumbled down Changtse with a sigh of finality.

* * *

He exhales. The powder below settles from its fury and reveals nothing but white, untouched snow and the unforgiving rock of the mountain. No body. 

It isn’t uncommon to see visions; the air is so thin. Antony waves back to Brutus and starts to put on his oxygen mask. The air is musty, but they continue on. 

* * *

Tall sheets of black rock jut out from the mountain, rising out of the snow like fins coming up out of the waves. The white whale breaches, an impartial eye cast upon the two climbers. Final approach.

* * *

Antony is the first of them to step up onto the small, jagged platform. The sun is warm, the sky is vivid and creamy blue. He pulls his oxygen mask down as he sits down on an uncomfortable rock. He fishes for his phone, tugging a mitten off. The air immediately stings his sweaty hand, his fingers having grown thick with his blood pressure, and he knows it will take an hour for them to warm up again once he puts his mitten back on. 

Snow melts on his phone screen. Antony bothers it to life, and the screen is barely visible in the bright sun. “Damn,” says Antony; it’s amazing that he still gets reception up here. He opens the camera and takes a selfie. He can’t see the picture. He has to hope that it turned out alright.

He can hear snow scattering as Brutus frontpoints his way up the last steep incline. He steps onto the summit, and Antony takes a picture of him, too.

* * *

  
  


There is something grotesque about seeing the world from this angle. Something perverse. Something inappropriate. It’s not just the physical world that falls away, but the toil as well. Looking back at rough scrambles and treacherous passes and snarling icefalls and seeing it finally for what it is - nothing.

Standing there on a two metre platform of ancient ice and primordial rock, with ropes keeping you from being swept away and thrown against the rocks, and oxygen to keep your body functioning, and four layers of clothes to keep the blood from freezing in your veins, and thick glasses to keep the sun and snow from blinding you. You don’t belong up here; that much is clear. Brutus breathes heavily and tries to look away. 

Antony is sitting on the summit. His oxygen mask is down, and his lips are cracked and pale. He takes a picture of Brutus.

Brutus joins him in sitting, though they cannot linger long. He opens a little pack of energy gel and sucks it down quickly. He gets another from his pack and opens the top, handing it out to Antony, who takes it and downs it as well. Antony chews on the plastic as he opens his own pack and starts to dig around for something. He produces a Polaroid photograph, bent and stained and torn and taped. He sticks the picture deep in the snow. 

It is of an old climber. Antony’s former climbing partner, a man that Brutus might have called “father”. Brutus remembers him well. Brutus misses him well.

Companionship at eight thousand metres is a strange thing. Neither of them say a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is your friendly reminder to not be like antony and to always leave no trace


	6. Epilogue

The drive back to civilization is the longest leg of the climb. They take shifts, sleeping for two hours, driving for two hours, rolling slowly along an endless road. 

* * *

The sun is still on the east side of the sky, though its arc is growing quite tall, beaming in through the back window and warming Brutus’s back as he dozes. He isn’t quite asleep; his meditation tape is only just focusing on getting him to relax his ankles. The soothing woman on the tape is a worthy match to the heavy aches that hug Brutus’s joints like ice. The van engine hums pleasantly, the comforter is well-worn and soft, the lumpy, thin mattress on the bed in the back of the van is familiar, and that sun—it welcomes him back to a habitable zone. He’s about to drift off, he knows he is.

The side door rolls open. The van shakes as someone gets in. 

“Hey, wake up,” Antony jostles him. It must be Brutus’s turn to drive. His eyes peel open. He adjusts again to the light, lets out a hefty cough, and glances behind Antony, looking out.

They’ve stopped at a roadside fruit stand.

“Get your credit card.” 

Brutus doesn’t question it, staggering out of the van. His stomach, having been filled with vitamins and powders and bars and dehydrated food for the last month, leads him forth. 

It’s hard to remember that it’s been summer this entire time.

They purchase fruit by the crateful, and perhaps it is a little irresponsible, but ravenous stomachs and tired minds and battered bodies are not known for upholding responsibility. Fresh watermelon, grapes, pistachios, pignoli, dried papaya, peaches, bell peppers, beet chips, cactus fruit jelly. They are like precious jewels among the pile of synthetic fabric and shiny chrome pouches of packaged macaroni and cheese.

* * *

They make off like bandits and stumble upon a rest stop perched on top of a knoll overlooking a lake. Tall pine trees with ruddy red trunks obscure the lakefront, but the sound of water lapping on warm, sandy banks and the glimmer of the sun sparkling on the surface and rebounding into the woods is obvious. Oars splashing lazily in the water rings out in the afternoon sky. Birds sing unseen in the tall, cool canopy. A breeze comes rambling down from the mountains and races through the undergrowth, stirring the fallen needles and deciduous leaves, coaxes little waves up from the lake. 

Antony braces against the breeze, expecting stinging cold and a cutting bite with a fistful of grains of snow tossed in his face. The air is warm, the breeze even warmer, scented with summery flora. He tries to relax.

He shakes out the hammock and tosses the other end. Brutus catches it and they tie each end between two scaly tree trunks.

* * *

The water, however, is ice cold, spitting out of a dubious-looking showerhead just outside of the bathrooms. It’s not intended for real showering, just quick rinses before and after taking a dip in the lake. The climbers make it work anyway.

Brutus holds up a tarp, trying to shield Antony’s naked body as he washes the grime and sweat off. The weak stream of water doesn’t do nearly as good enough as a job, but their standards are skewed, and the act of showering is making Antony feel human again. Brutus sticks his cupped hand around the tarp and Antony scoops the last of the handful of hand soap Brutus collected from the bathroom. The pitiful, discoloured suds are washed down the mouldy drain. 

Only two people end up seeing. A pudgy fisherman with carrot-orange hair and all sorts of lures clipped onto his person, and his wife, with a face like a catfish.

“Ciao,” says Antony, lathering up his armpits.

“Buonasera,” says Brutus, “salvete.”

They walk on, scoffing about shameless Italian tourists.

* * *

The willow tree beside the tent stretches and leans in the lazy breeze, letting the golden sun of the high evening stream through its wisping tendrils. It gleams on Brutus’s face in sparkling rays, the sunlight filtering through the canopy in a mimicry of the way light penetrates the water column and drifts down to the sandy sea floor. He sits, trying to read a book that Antony loaned him, but his mind lingers singularly on the same line over and over again. 

He gives up and lays down. A clique of honeybees chide him for his sloth as they diligently nestle within the cluster of wildflowers. 

A twig snaps. It’s Antony. Brutus pokes his head out of the tent when his name is called. 

“I found some Germans.” He’s carrying a plate wrapped in foil. “Some sweet, kind, muscley, culinarily gifted Germans.”

* * *

They set out blankets and recline on the beach and eat. They make a fire and roast the bell pepper. Brutus sticks the end of a cigarette in the flames and smokes, coughing as he does. The little waves of the lake lap at the sand. The water is stained as red as the Nile in the late evening sun. 

“Do you miss being on the mountain?” Brutus asks. Antony makes a noise, following a bite of grilled sausage with a bell pepper spear and a handful of pignoli. 

He nods. “Without a doubt. Do you?”

“It’s complicated." Antony gestures at him to say more. Brutus thinks and continues. "Maybe I won’t miss being  _ there _ , but there are still things that I'll miss terribly. That I miss  _ now _ , and we haven’t even gotten back yet." He takes a drag. "I don’t really know how to cherish what I have. I only know how to long for it.” 

Antony hums in agreement. “No sense mourning that beef stroganoff, no matter how good it tasted.” 

Brutus scowls. He looks over at Antony and suddenly sees the knowing gleam in his eyes. He’s spent too many days cramped in a tent, tethered by rope, listening to his singing, and watching him freeze his cock off pissing in the snow to even consider misreading that look. Brutus's face eases. No need to get upset. 

He scoffs, flicks ash in the sand. “Well,” he says, “it didn’t taste  _ that _ good.”

A grin overtakes Antony’s face. “It tasted  _ really _ good. I think it’s probably your favourite food, maybe out of everything you’ve ever eaten.”

“Beef stroganoff shouldn’t push his luck.”

“Whatever you say, MJ.”

* * *

The sun lets itself be devoured by the horizon. Dusk lingers for a long while in the summery sky, reflecting the pinks and purples and oranges of the wildflowers even as stars start to peek through the celestial firmament. The two retire back to the tent long before the world grows dark. Brutus lingers out in the soft undergrowth for a moment. 

The miserable thing about mountains is that climbing them is a choice, an election. Going back down is mandatory.

Someday soon, they would have to move on from their camp tucked in the trees, beside the lakefront. Antony would return to dirtbagging around the continent, filming videos for his sponsors, continuing his stunts and never double-checking his ice screws. 

Brutus would relapse into his life as an heir and socialite, quietly sneaking away to the Dolomites or the Alps or the Urals every month or so, hoping to see that beat-up van at the trailhead. They would both dream for months of these moments, of dozing under the canopy, of shivering together, freezing and fearful.

And people would ask about the excursion, about the bruised ribs and the wet cough, the stunning sights and the crushing trials, the shrink tape on that multi coloured rope. People would ask. How could I ever describe it, Brutus wonders, staring out at that white-capped mystery on the western horizon. How could he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Title based on the song of the same name by CHVRCHES. I should mention that this fic was almost called "belay all your love on me"


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